We're rejuvenated from our little sojourn to Kunming and head north out of the city on G108. Daniel and I are riding together, we will meet Felix later, as he stayed with friends outside of town. The road isn't very good, lots of construction and heavy traffic. I'm not feeling tremendously confident either, something about crashing always makes you feel a bit unsure. I find myself over-thinking how I ride instead of enjoying it. As noon approaches, I get a call from Felix and we decide to regroup in Wuding for lunch. After a quick feed, we're back on the road and become a little mixed up trying to get out of town. Sometimes the GPS and road construction projects seem to disagree on where G108 actually is. About twenty kilometers outside of town, we come around a corner and I slip and crash again.... yes... I wiped it again. Fortunately there's no damage, as I was only going about 30kph, but the bruise on my hip didn't enjoy another smack on the pavement. We stop for a few minutes and Daniel comes along. He exclaims, "wow I almost lost it in that corner back there". We move on, be it a little more slowly.

The road gets better and we start to enjoy some interesting scenery. I was surprised to see this little catholic church as I wandered along.

We start climbing. From this point on, almost everything will be mountains.

A great overlook with beautiful terraces. Things should be green here, they definitely need rain.

Daniel passing a heard of goats.

The wandering goat herder.

Looking down at the valley below.

Passing Felix at another overlook.

Felix waiting for me, probably wondering if I've fallen again. It will become an ongoing joke for the rest of the trip.

What a view.

Surrounded by nature, we choose to photograph motorcycles instead.

Daniel, reaching the top of one of the many peaks.

A view from the top before we start descending again.

A beautiful descent into a small valley.

Felix getting his groove on.

Our destination for the day, the city of Panzihua.

Even though I was driving like an old lady, we still made good time getting to Panzihua. One thing you need to remember about traveling China is the fact that it only has one time zone. Once you make your way West, you gain daylight on the clock, which meant we had until almost 8:00 before it would get dark. Being that we had some time, we decided to find a decent place to change our oil. Felix's back brake also needed some attention. We were surprisingly lucky to find a good shop in less than 5 minutes. The shop guys were big motorcycle fans, and called in the troops to check out the foreigners. We all changed our oil and then attempted to fix Felix's brake. Unfortunately, his rear master cylinder was toast. Calls were made, and someone had a Galaxy that was willing to donate the part. Rather than keep everyone waiting, we decided to go have dinner with the bikers of Panzihua.

What a great group of people. Not only did they give us free food and beer, they also donated the part to fix Felix's brake. There are some very fine people in Panzihua, and we were lucky to be in such good company.

We feasted for hours and swapped tales as all bikers do. As time rolled on, so did the ganbei's (bottoms up). Eventually, Daniel and I had to call it quits, but the Irishman inside Felix was just getting going. It was a late night for that boy, but a great one I'm sure.

Some of us were up earlier than others, and one of us was a little hungover. A group of Panzihua bikers were taking care of Felix's rear brake and they decided to escort us into the mountains on our way out of town. It was another beautiful day, and the locals told us the road from Panzihua to Luguhu was very good. We had a little bit of a late start, but there was no hurry, as we only needed to cover 250 kilometers to reach our destination. We headed North on S216 and were immediately into the mountains on a beautiful twisty road.

The road surface was good, but I wasn't taking any chances, so I keep things nice and slow.

You can see how dry things were and patches of the hillside where fires have burned.

Daniel stopped to share a friendly smile with some local people.

Felix decided to step up the pace a bit and had a good run with the Panzihua bikers. You can see a small fire burning in the hills.

After climbing all morning, we made a long descent towards the town of Yumen and the Er Tan reservoir. I let the racers go ahead and took my time soaking in the beauty of all the little villages we passed. The amount of work that goes into these terraces for farming is amazing.

In Yumen, we parted ways with the boys from Panzihua. They went to go play in the hills on their dirt-bikes, we continued on towards Luguhu.

The Er Tan reservoir was almost empty. It hasn't rained in this region for ten months.

We started climbing again and making our way through the switchbacks. Click on the picture for a larger version.

We stopped for lunch and enjoyed the company of this woman. She was carrying her grandchild on her back and enjoying a smoke. We couldn't understand much of what she said, but exchanged a lot of smiles.

After lunch, we reached S307 near Bodaxiang. I would like to try the section of S216 that goes north east from there, but that will have to wait for another trip. S307 runs with the Chahe/Jiami river and it's a very nice road with lots of deep canyons.

For some reason, I had this feeling I was here before. When I reached this waterfall, I realized this was a section of road I covered with CrazyCarl back in 2008. Same spot, different trip.

In the late afternoon, we finally reach our destination, the stunning Lake Luguhu. The lake borders Yunnan and Sichuan and sits at 3500 meters above sea level. Around the lake are many small villages, home to peoples of the Mosuo minority group, who for centuries have lived in a matriarchal society.

Felix

Daniel

Me

Ah the good life. Napping on the shore of the lake.

Group shot

This is the small town of ShangLuoShui on the Southwest side of the lake. We stayed in the same hotel as the last time I was here. I love this place. It's laid back, the accommodations are inexpensive, and although it's a little commercial, it hasn't been overrun by the tourism industry…yet.

Waking up in a spot like Luguhu is breathtaking. I made some coffee and just stood there at the window of my hotel room gazing at the beautiful morning. I really didn't care what time we left, I probably could have sat there all day.

We finally loaded up and hit the road around 10:00. One last shot of the lake as we headed north into Sichuan.

This would be our first day of riding into the "unknown". Up until this point, most of the roads we traveled were well documented on maps or the GPS. The road out of Luguhu going north branches off in several directions, and you must rely on passing strangers or gut feel to find the right way.

We proceeded through a few small villages and assumed we were making progress.

Felix sat waiting on this bridge while I tried to figure out why we were crossing rivers where the map showed none. Asking the horse would have been a better idea than consulting the map.

I'm fairly sure this person had no idea where we wanted to go.

We're definitely going the wrong way at this point, but damn, it sure is beautiful.

Backtracking to where we asked directions before.

Somehow I don't think this alley is the right way.

Ahhh… that's better, at least it looks like this should take us somewhere.

We finally made it to a road that was on the GPS, X042. I was sure this was correct, and thankfully it was.

The locals like to decorate their motorcycles with silk fabric and flowers. Felix likes to photograph pretty things. A match made in heaven.

Asking for directions was fun, as the name of the next town we were heading to was called Wu Jiao Meng Gu Zu, a rather long name for a Chinese city. The road cut through deep gorges and there were some great campsites along the river. We will regret not camping there later this evening.

After Wu Jiao Meng Gu Zu, the road starts to climb and there's no traffic at all. We eventually reached 4000 meters before a very long descent to Taoba.

Woof… usually these dogs go bonkers as you approach, but this one just sat there staring at me.

I have no idea what this checkpoint was for, but we all signed our names and got approval to continue on. I think it was a safety check for vehicles heading up the mountain we had just come down.

After a lovely afternoon, we started riding parallel to the Litang River. It was time for our punishment. According to the map, this should have been S216, but it will be many years before that road is ready for normal traffic. Currently there are huge hydro and mining projects going on here and it looks like a battle-zone from all of the heavy truck traffic. Each truck that passes creates a sandstorm of fine silt that covers everything and takes away your visibility. Eventually we reached a roadblock and had to wait while they blasted off the side of a mountain. It was getting late, and we were hoping to find a place to camp.

After passing the demolition detour, we kept looking for any kind of place to throw up our tents. We reached a junction with a tiny store and tried to get some intel on the road situation. The people barely spoke Mandarin and couldn't understand where we wanted to go. If we continued north along the river, we were doomed to another 30 or 40 kilometers of crap and little hope of a place to camp. My gut was telling me we should be at S216 going west, but S216 doesn't really exist yet, and being on the edge of a mountain made it difficult to determine which road actually went west. We agreed to head north for 15 minutes in search of a place to camp, found nothing, and backtracked to the little store again. It was now dark and with all the dust covering our bikes, and floating in the air, we couldn't see anything. Tempers flared for a few moments and things were not looking good. Fortunately we managed to pick the correct road west, and within a few minutes we came to a tiny town with a one bedroom trucker hotel. We asked if it was vacant and the owner was happy to put us up for the night. We unloaded the bikes and filled up on peanuts, crackers and beer for dinner. It had been a long day, and everyone fell into bed early, completely exhausted.

Lovely camera work, great writing, culminating in a fantastic insight to a country that I know little about Thank you!

I've never seen or heard of the offroad bikes your riding, assume Chinese origin...what are they like...reliability, performance etc. From the pics they look pretty good

Thank you to everyone for the nice comments so far. Still have more to post and the best scenery is coming up .

Bowes, the bikes are made by Galaxy Motorcycles in Guangdong province China. There is a full report about them and all of the modifications I did before the trip at this link. They're based on the air cooled Honda FTR223 engine, so they are pretty reliable. Galaxy has picked some of the better suppliers of Chinese parts and the technology and performance is fairly good. Seem to have survived being tossed off a bridge OK. .

Great Report, I love the look of that countryside - quite a few Eucalypts on the side of the roads - that Aussie export has found its way all over the world.
I assume you all speak some Mandarin? would it be possible to do a trip like this with arm waving,pointing, laughing(crying!!!) and no mandarin?

Having studied in Dalian, I'm a huge fan of the China ride reports. The scenery in the south is amazing. I miss throwing back a few of the big returnables 干杯! I'm insanely jealous.

Sorry about laying the bike down, do you think its just oil on the road, poor rubber? I know the Chinese trucks are notorious for leaking oil. Its a bit stressful not feeling confident around bends with uncertain conditions.

ChinaV thanks for the reply, I read the link on the bikes...very interesting. Lookin forward to more of the report, just read it again and enjoyed and looked a long time at some of the pics.

Some of the photos of the local Chinese people and scenery are absolutley stunning...thank you for taking the time to share with us lucky readers I'll be checking in for more!

Quote:

Originally Posted by chinaV

Thank you to everyone for the nice comments so far. Still have more to post and the best scenery is coming up .

Bowes, the bikes are made by Galaxy Motorcycles in Guangdong province China. There is a full report about them and all of the modifications I did before the trip at this link. They're based on the air cooled Honda FTR223 engine, so they are pretty reliable. Galaxy has picked some of the better suppliers of Chinese parts and the technology and performance is fairly good. Seem to have survived being tossed off a bridge OK. .